mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

ThinkOmni: Lifting Textual Reasoning to Omni-modal Scenarios via Guidance Decoding

arXiv 2602.23306 ↗First posted 26 Feb 2026cs.CVcited by 4

On the map: LLM reasoning → Multimodal reasoning

Abstract (arXiv)

Omni-modal reasoning is essential for intelligent systems to understand and draw inferences from diverse data sources. While existing omni-modal large language models (OLLM) excel at perceiving diverse modalities, they lack the complex reasoning abilities of recent large reasoning models (LRM). However, enhancing the reasoning ability of OLLMs through additional training presents significant challenges, including the need for high-quality data, task-specific adaptation, and substantial computational costs. To address these limitations, we propose ThinkOmni, a training-free and data-free framework that lifts textual reasoning to omni-modal scenarios. ThinkOmni introduces two key components: 1) LRM-as-a-Guide, which leverages off-the-shelf LRMs to guide the OLLM decoding process; 2) Stepwise Contrastive Scaling, which adaptively balances perception and reasoning signals without manual hyperparameter tuning. Experiments on six multi-modal reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that ThinkOmni consistently delivers performance improvements, with main results achieving 70.2 on MathVista and 75.5 on MMAU. Overall, ThinkOmni offers a flexible and generalizable solution for omni-modal reasoning and provides new insights into the generalization and application of reasoning capabilities. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/1ranGuan/thinkomni

Key facts. Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 42 of its 47 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 26 Feb 2026.

Builds on

42 of 47 references.

Closest ancestors · 11

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025Shuffle-R1: Efficient RL framework for Multimodal Large Language Models via Data-centric Dynamic Shuffle7 Aug
  2. 2025HumanOmniV2: From Understanding to Omni-Modal Reasoning with Context26 Jun
  3. 2025ProxyThinker: Test-Time Guidance through Small Visual Reasoners30 May
  4. 2025Mind with Eyes: from Language Reasoning to Multimodal Reasoning23 Mar
  5. 2025R1-Onevision: Advancing Generalized Multimodal Reasoning through Cross-Modal Formalization13 Mar
  6. 2025Seg-Zero: Reasoning-Chain Guided Segmentation via Cognitive Reinforcement9 Mar
  7. 2025Visual-RFT: Visual Reinforcement Fine-Tuning3 Mar
  8. 2024LLaVA-CoT: Let Vision Language Models Reason Step-by-Step15 Nov
  9. 2024OmnixR: Evaluating Omni-modality Language Models on Reasoning across Modalities16 Oct
  10. 2024Measuring Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning with MATH-Vision Dataset22 Feb
  11. 2023MathVista: Evaluating Mathematical Reasoning of Foundation Models in Visual Contexts3 Oct

Other references · 31

  1. 2024DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Modelscited by 8,851
  2. 2025Qwen3 Technical Reportcited by 8,195
  3. 2025DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learningcited by 6,146
  4. 2024GPT-4o System Cardcited by 4,467
  5. 2025DAPO: An Open-Source LLM Reinforcement Learning System at Scalecited by 2,678
  6. 2025Kimi k1.5: Scaling Reinforcement Learning with LLMscited by 1,193
  7. 2025Qwen2.5-Omni Technical Reportcited by 704
  8. 2023Mitigating Object Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models through Visual Contrastive Decodingcited by 671
  9. 2022Contrastive Decoding: Open-ended Text Generation as Optimizationcited by 598
  10. 2024MathVerse: Does Your Multi-modal LLM Truly See the Diagrams in Visual Math Problems?cited by 573
  11. 2023DoLa: Decoding by Contrasting Layers Improves Factuality in Large Language Modelscited by 367
  12. 2024MMAU: A Massive Multi-Task Audio Understanding and Reasoning Benchmarkcited by 281
19 more
  1. 2025VITA-1.5: Towards GPT-4o Level Real-Time Vision and Speech Interactioncited by 191
  2. 2025Time-R1: Post-Training Large Vision Language Model for Temporal Video Groundingcited by 138
  3. 2025MiMo: Unlocking the Reasoning Potential of Language Model -- From Pretraining to Posttrainingcited by 117
  4. 2025Baichuan-Omni-1.5 Technical Reportcited by 107
  5. 2024Mini-Omni2: Towards Open-source GPT-4o with Vision, Speech and Duplex Capabilitiescited by 104
  6. 2025Daily-Omni: Towards Audio-Visual Reasoning with Temporal Alignment across Modalitiescited by 101
  7. 2024OmniBench: Towards The Future of Universal Omni-Language Modelscited by 100
  8. 2025R1-Omni: Explainable Omni-Multimodal Emotion Recognition with Reinforcement Learningcited by 99
  9. 2019Look, Listen, and Act: Towards Audio-Visual Embodied Navigationcited by 95
  10. 2024Tuning Language Models by Proxycited by 88
  11. 2025Think Silently, Think Fast: Dynamic Latent Compression of LLM Reasoning Chainscited by 81
  12. 2025Ola: Pushing the Frontiers of Omni-Modal Language Modelcited by 79
  13. 2023Contrastive Decoding Improves Reasoning in Large Language Modelscited by 71
  14. 2025Reinforcement Learning Outperforms Supervised Fine-Tuning: A Case Study on Audio Question Answeringcited by 64
  15. 2025Omni-R1: Do You Really Need Audio to Fine-Tune Your Audio LLM?cited by 42
  16. 2025Omni-R1: Reinforcement Learning for Omnimodal Reasoning via Two-System Collaborationcited by 38
  17. 2024Theorem-Validated Reverse Chain-of-Thought Problem Generation for Geometric Reasoningcited by 32
  18. 2025Stream-Omni: Simultaneous Multimodal Interactions with Large Language-Vision-Speech Modelcited by 17
  19. 2025OpenOmni: Advancing Open-Source Omnimodal Large Language Models with Progressive Multimodal Alignment and Real-Time Self-Aware Emotional Speech Synthesiscited by 10

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 4.

4 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025OMHBench: Benchmarking Balanced and Grounded Omni-Modal Multi-Hop Reasoning
  2. 2026Text-Centric Post-Training for Omni-Modal Reasoning
  3. 2025Agent-Omni: Test-Time Multimodal Reasoning via Model Coordination for Understanding Anything
  4. 2026Cross-Modal Coreference Alignment: Enabling Reliable Information Transfer in Omni-LLMs
  5. 2026CoLT: Teaching Multi-Modal Models to Think with Chain of Latent Thoughts
  6. 2025AStar: Boosting Multimodal Reasoning with Automated Structured Thinking
  7. 2026Balancing Efficiency and Efficacy: Training-Free Attention-Guided Switching Between Explicit and Latent Thoughts for MLLMs
  8. 2025Encode, Think, Decode: Scaling test-time reasoning with recursive latent thoughts